Mumbai’s Urban Left-Overs

One good thing of all those people traveling to India is that they take pictures of all kinds of phenomena that are somehow strange to our Western perspective, and share them with their friends, relatives and the rest of the world.

The picture is taken in Dharavy in Mumbai. It shows the informal use of abandoned city places (according to the photographer). No space goes unused, it says. “Spaces near the train tracks are off limits to people building houses. This doesn’t stop them from using that land for farming. This, and the next two images, is of an urban farm at the Sion train station. The vegetables and herbs raised here were being sold on the street market (depicted above) just less than 100m away.”

Some days ago I stumbled upon a pretty nice app that functions as a useful link between food trucks and their customers. Under the slogan “Find out where your next meal is parked”, US-based mobile food vendors platform Roaming Hunger has launched an interactive iPhone application that enables its users to track, locate, and explore the…

Recently, Amsterdam-based urban concept office Golfstromen launched the temporary QR Cloud Project in the western part of the Dutch capital. The project consists of seven artworks that make use of QR technology to present coded micro stories, poems and proverbs written by Dutch writers, poets and scientists. Famous sociologist Abram de Swaan, creative team Kim…

These days lots and lots of artistic projects are aimed at improving human interaction in public space. Montréal’s Museum of Possibilities (Musée des Possibles) is such a project, but a special one, that seems to be a physical life-sized version of the recently featured online crowdsourcing project Give a Minute. The urban authorities asked Melissa Mongiat,…

I believe that it takes some personal interest on a subject to develop a smartphone application for that. I guess that’s what happened to Eric Lo, a young media designer from San Francisco, who likes to eat street tacos and was frustrated by not being able to track one easily, due to their pop-up nature. Lo developed FoodCarts, a prototype iOS application that allows its user to find a food cart in and around San Francisco in real-time.